ABSTRACT
John F. Kennedy School o f Government, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138; and Resources for the Future, Washington, DC 20036
Received September 11,1998; revised May 4,1999; published online August 10,2000
The possibility of encouraging the growth of forests as a means of sequestering carbon dioxide has received considerable attention, partly because of evidence that this can be a relatively inexpensive means of combating climate change. But how sensitive are such estimates to specific conditions? We examine the sensitivity of carbon sequestration costs to changes in critical factors, including the nature of management and deforestation regimes, silvicultural species, relative prices, and discount rates. © 2000 Academic Press
The Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change [37] establishes the principle that carbon sequestration can be used by participating nations to help meet their respective net emission reduction targets for carbon dioxide (C 02) and other greenhouse gases.3 Several studies have found that growing trees to sequester carbon could provide relatively low-cost net
1 Valuable comments on previous versions of this paper were provided by Lawrence Goulder, William Nordhaus, Andrew Plantinga, Kenneth Richards, Roger Sedjo, two anonymous referees, an associate editor, and participants in seminars at the Universities of California at Los Angeles and Santa Barbara, Maryland, Michigan, and Texas, Harvard, Stanford, and Yale Universities, Resources for the Future, and the National Bureau of Economic Research. The authors alone are responsible for any errors.
